Is that like some hacking lingo?
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The others are likely the answer you want, but to go a bit more into the etymology, the prevalence of rubber ducks in hacker culture can be at least partly attributed to a practice called “rubber duck debugging” which is one of my favorite bits of info, so I’m going to share it for a minute.
When a program doesn’t behave like it is supposed to, you go into debugging – one of many techniques for debugging is simply describing in sufficient detail what the code is doing, versus what it is designed to do – that can be done with a co-worker or friend by talking to them about the problem, but in a busy environment (or for lonely coders), explaining to a stand-in is often sufficient (as sometimes just the act of explaining the problem leads to the solution)
For times like these, some programmers took to keeping an actual rubber ducky (that is, the bath toy shaped like a duck made of rubber, not the malicious thumb drive) at their desks, and explaining badly-behaving bits of code to it so that they could get the duck’s infinite wisdom on the topic to then fix the bug they were encountering (if it wasn’t overly obvious, this is very tongue-in-cheek) – since this became somewhat standard practice, rubber ducks have shown up in various hacker- and programmer-related things.
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